The Walking Dead: The Final Season Episode 1Review

Since the beginning, Telltale’s The Walking Dead has always been Clementine’s story. From her early stages as a young child under Lee’s care in season one to her current status as a budding young survivor in this fourth and final season, the entire series has largely hinged on her development in the aftermath of the apocalypse.

The first episode of this final season focuses a great deal on the parallels between Clementine and Lee, taking everything he taught her and preparing to pass it on to AJ, her own young ward (who we met in season 2). While the parallels between the two situations are similar, stark differences between Clementine and AJ’s childhoods make it a more intriguing and unpredictable dynamic than that of Clementine and Lee. The premiere sets the season up for an emotionally charged and powerful arc, but heavy exposition and character building make this a slow, gradual build.

Exit Theatre Mode

The season begins with Clementine and AJ being rescued by a group of teens and children. Elements of Lord of the Flies are present in their camp, with the kids trying to create their own hierarchy by working together to find food and survive in their own designated “safe zone.” It’s intriguing in that it gives us an opportunity to meet a whole new crew of survivors, but never strays from retreading the familiar sequence of events of any other episode or story in The Walking Dead, making it a predictable and somewhat dull beginning.

While Clementine’s arc is the dominant storyline in this final season, perhaps the most interesting character development of the episode belongs to AJ. From the start, it’s made clear he has a completely different frame of reference from Clementine and is not beholden to ideas of human decency and morality held by those who knew the pre-Walker world. In the opening moments, he spins the cylinder of a revolver playfully in the backseat of the car, treating the deadly weapon like a child’s toy. But as they’re integrating into the group of kids he’s initially ostracized for his violent tendencies and later must learn vital social skills to successfully interact. He doesn’t recognize toys of police officers and firefighters, and he’s unfamiliar with the meaning and purpose of art. His growing process is written from the perspective of a young boy, and while moments of delivery are clunky and paired with limited facial animations, it mostly delivers in portraying a troubled boy emotionally torn in several different directions.

It’s interesting to think of AJ as the inverse of Clementine. The course of her story has seen her learning how to let go of the safe, civilized world she knew and embracing the darker sides of herself that enable her survival, while AJ needs to be introduced to the ways of the old world to function among those who want to build a new one.

Exit Theatre Mode

The result is a powerful dynamic between the two, in which Clementine attempts to teach nuance and blurred lines to a child whose personality has been shaped by stark fight-or-flight impulses. In this final series we see her story come full circle and share many parallels with Lee, the reluctant caregiver of a child the world forgot.

After that introduction, the middle act of this two-hour episode is bogged down by numerous repetitive and drawn-out interactions. Extended conversation sequences provide necessary exposition detailing the backstory of the kids in the school, but often meander needlessly and deliver repeated information. Even in cases where gameplay elements like fishing or playing cards add activity to the dialogue-driven gameplay, these interactions often serve as speed bumps and slow the momentum of the story in a way that becomes frustrating. It’s the combination of this oversized info dump and the obligation to check in with a needless surplus of characters that becomes the biggest detracting factor.

However, when it breaks out of that rut it does so with gusto by staying true to The Walking Dead’s brutal and unforgiving style and forcing characters into painful situations. Throughout episode one we see violent outbursts leading to deaths, desperate actions taken on the part of survivors both inside and outside of the school, Clementine repeatedly defending AJ’s violent nature, and that Lord of the Flies-style arc that drives home the central theme of children being forced to adjust to a world they’re not yet ready to navigate.

Combat is mainly made up of quick-time events and basic button prompts offering different actions, usually between stunning or brutally killing an opponent. Some of these encounters had odd timing that felt off-rhythm and sometimes resulted in unfair-feeling deaths, but the moments of successfully burying a blade in a zombie’s head never lost its satisfaction.

Exit Theatre Mode

Much of the interactivity within the episode is focused on building relationships with characters, exploring the environment, and collecting items to later aid in progressing storylines. Some areas of the map open up to allow Clementine to move more freely, but much of it retains the same hyper-focused linearity with branching options the series (and Telltale’s expansive catalog as a whole) has long clung to. It does reduce the scale of the world, but allows the story to take a more centralized role at the forefront of the episode.

A majority of the opportunities for choice in this episode hinge on character interactions and shaping relationships with the other kids in the school, with the usual notifications popping up to indicate that characters will remember key events or that your relationship with them has changed in some particular way. However, because this is the first episode, I didn’t get the sense that these actions and decisions will be built upon in significant ways in later installments, which ultimately leads to a lack of payoff for much of your work.

The Verdict

Clementine’s arc is setting up for a spectacular finish in this final season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead. Even as we’ve watched her grow and evolve over the course of three seasons, her interactions with other characters and continued development in this nightmare world consistently allows us to learn new things about her in every new installment. Her relationship with AJ works on multiple levels, both as a callback to her relationship to her original father figure and a mirror image of her own struggle to adapt to her violent world. While some of the exposition-heavy conversations drone on longer than they should, it ends on a powerful note foreshadowing some difficult lessons Clementine has yet to learn about what it means to grow up and lead in a post-society world.